Things I teach at the University of Westminster

Social Media

02/06/2012

One research site we might look at today is Delicious - it's a social bookmarking tool - which means it allows you to store bookmarks online and then share those bookmarks with other Delicious users...

The site has recently be revamped by its new owners - the guys who started YouTube. They bought Delicious from Yahoo around a year ago. Before that it had been left to languish a bit. The new owners have added new social features and made the site a bit more visual. There are lots of other sites around that do similar things - for example, Diigo and Pinboard. It's worth playing around with them and seeing which one works best for you.

Today we'll talk a bit about how best to use social bookmarking tools as part of your approach to research online.

02/18/2011

Our live blogging experiment didn't go entirely to plan last week. It is a difficult thing to do, especially if you're not familiar with the technology. That said, we were online and watching when Mubarak stepped down - and those of you who were tracking Twitter at the time will have seen how many tweets that generated...

One of the best ways to keep track of Twitter updates about Egypt (and the Middle East in general) is to follow Andy Carvin on Twitter (@acarvin). He works for National Public Radio in the US and has been specialising in curating tweets about Egypt, trying to verify and then retweet key bits of information as they come to him. Lots of people have said he's been developing a new kind of real time reporting. It seems like an extension of the live blogging idea.

He talked about how he does what he does to The Atlantic - it takes a lot of preparation, a lot of traditional reporting - to build the kind of contextual knowledge that means he can trust and verify the tweets he passes on. PBS also did an interview with him about how he used Twitter to cover Egypt which we might look at in class